​“A Picture Held Us Captive”: Using Wittgenstein to Reimagine Disability and “Dis-ease”

Traditionally, disability has fallen into two broad models: the medical and the social. The medical model construes disability as pathology and attempts to diagnose and mitigate the effects of the disability. The social model resists attempts to locate disability within the non-typical body and instead focuses on the ways in which structures, institutions, and communities create and assign “disability.” Recent work in Critical Disability Studies (CDS) has disrupted this binary, offering searching critiques of both models of disability. In an essay in Culture-Theory-Disability (2017), McRuer argues that the quintessential statement of the social model-- “We’re not disabled” -- is “always a dangerous statement [since] … it depends upon conjuring a ‘real’ or ‘essential’ disorder located and embodied somewhere else” (63). Thus CDS critiques facile representations of the social model which reinforce the pathological medical model by essentializing and thereby reifying “disability.”

This paper will offer an ordinary language critique at the intersection of medical practice, disability studies, and theology. The growing influence of the social model of disability has led to attempts within medicine to change the language of disability, moving, for instance, from the language of “mental retardation” to “person with a disability.” Attempts to change the language are often attempts to remove stigma and blame attached to concepts of non-normativity and pathology. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Cavell, I will suggest that such cosmetic changes to language, especially in attempts to be “politically-correct,” obscure and leave unchanged the forms of life from which both medical and social grammars of disability emerge and in which they are used. In addition, I will consider the recent reclamation within CDS and the disability community of the slur “cripple,” particularly a refashioned form (“Crip”) in the work of Sharon Betcher (Spirit and the Politics of Disablement). This appropriation challenges simple understandings of good/bad words (in and outside the medical community) and further complicates, with McRuer, the relationship between disability and pathology.

I will conclude by considering the way disability is spoken about within an intentionally neuro-diverse Christian community. I will suggest that disability poses a challenge to common medical and Christian language which share a tendency, rooted in their own self-understanding, to construe disablement as pathology and offer a route to salvation. I will argue that cosmetic changes to language do not disrupt this tendency. Instead, attention to the basic forms of life of one particular religious community reveals exciting ways to treat the “dis-ease” of disability – both in society and in the non-typical body. Such an approach, I argue, escapes the social/medical binary of disability and suggests important considerations about the relationship of religion to medicine.